Ethan's engaging attitude

A few years ago, Ethan Hawke's acting career had gone so cold that his agent urged him to fly to Los Angeles and meet with industry people who might help him resurrect his reputation.

One of them was Antoine Fuqua, who was about to direct Training Day. The meeting was serendipitous. Denzel Washington had already signed on to star as a corrupt narcotics detective and, it turned out, he wanted Hawke to play the detective's rookie partner.

Hawke not only got the part, he received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

"I had all but given up on that accolade," Hawke says now. "I felt really lucky because I wasn't expecting it."

Unlike actors who achieve prominence and then fade away, Hawke has displayed resilience and versatility. When acting roles dried up, he began concentrating on projects of his own, and now they're coming to fruition. Hawke, 31, made his directorial debut last week in the United States with a stylistic film called Chelsea Walls, about the eccentrics who live at the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York. And his second novel, Ash Wednesday, is finished and will be published in July.");document.write("

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Given his productivity and an admitted obsessiveness with his work, one would expect Hawke to appear somewhat intense and driven.

The opposite is true.

He is bright and slightly scruffy and possesses both a self-deprecating wit and the self- confidence of a man who can mention off-handedly that he is "married to one of the most beautiful women in the world" - Uma Thurman.

Hawke is upfront about his ego. Asked what it was like to co-star with Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society (1989) - Hawke's second movie, made when he was 18 - he is candid. "It was kind of hard working with Robin," he says. "It wasn't so much that he was intimidating. It's that I didn't want to be intimidated by him. And I like being the centre of attention, and you could never be the centre of attention with him."

"But he's a nice guy," Hawke adds.

Shot on digital video and budgeted at a mere $100,000, Chelsea Walls was one of 10 digital films produced by InDigEnt, an offshoot of the Independent Film Channel. But once Hawke convinced Kris Kristofferson to star as a denizen of the hotel and then added Thurman to the cast, the film was picked up for distribution by Lions Gate Films.

Kristofferson decided to do the movie for what Hawke said was "very little money" after Hawke wrote him an impassioned note saying that he was the only actor for the role. "Usually something like this doesn't see the light of day," Kristofferson said from his home in Maui, Hawaii. "I lived at the Chelsea Hotel at the start of my career back when Andy Warhol and Patti Smith were there. It was quite an experience to go back for a week."

Hawke also stayed at the Chelsea Hotel a few times when he first moved to Manhattan, and now has an office there. He said he had been drawn by its bohemian reputation.

Until then, Hawke had done quite well on his own. He was born in Texas but moved around the country with his mother, eventually settling in Princeton, New Jersey, where he acted in a play for a local theatre company.

Liking acting, he started going to open casting calls in New York. Soon after, at 14, he won a starring role in a science-fiction film called Explorers.

"It was a really big deal in my hometown," Hawke recalls. "Then it came out and it was a bomb. I stopped acting after that."

Hawke revived his acting in high school and was later accepted by the drama department at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

But it was a short-lived academic career. "I didn't like it," he says. "I heard about the audition for Dead Poets Society, auditioned and got it." Roles in movies like Dad (1989) and White Fang (1991) quickly followed.

In some ways, however, Hawke's career never recovered from the Zeitgeist moment that was Reality Bites. In the movie, Hawke played a philosophical slacker vying with a slick yuppie (Ben Stiller) for the affection of an aspiring film maker played by Winona Ryder. "I never thought that I would be labelled something like Generation X because of that movie," Hawke says. "I had no idea going into it, and it wasn't a label I could relate to." In fact, Hawke has always professed to be more interested in art than commerce. He was the co-founder and artistic director of Malaparte, a Manhattan theatre company that is now defunct, and has avoided Hollywood, preferring to live in Manhattan.

But not long after Reality Bites came out, Hawke achieved another kind of notoriety when he asked Julia Roberts to dance at a Manhattan club. The two were photographed, and because Roberts was married to Lyle Lovett at the time, the picture was splashed over the tabloids.

Perhaps unfairly, the escapade solidified Hawke's reputation of being more downtown poseur than true artist. Some of his best performances were overshadowed by tabloid attention to his romance and marriage to Thurman.

His first novel, The Hottest State (1996), about a 21-year-old Manhattan man trying to figure out love, sold a respectable 40,000 copies and got some decent reviews. But Hawke was still ridiculed in some quarters.

It didn't dissuade him from writing his new novel, which was reportedly sold to Knopf for $400,000 to $500,000. He describes it as a "meditation on marriage".

Marriage is something close to his heart, Hawke says. He and Thurman were married in July 1998 and have a daughter Maya, aged three, and a son, Roan, who was born in January. Hawke speaks of his wife with great devotion, yet he says he cannot abide the many celebrities who boast about their idyllic relationships until they fall apart.

"I love being married," Hawke continues. "Marriage saved me from narcissism and self-absorption. But you never hear from famous people about how marriage is hard work. It's about learning how to love someone and being loved, and it isn't always easy. I'm married to one of the most beautiful women in the world, but even she doesn't look the way she does in magazines when she wakes up in the morning."

Hawke says he is "indebted" to Thurman for agreeing to co-star in Chelsea Walls.

"Uma has the kind of mystique that fits in with the characters at the hotel," he says. "And I wanted to offer her the kind of role she doesn't often get. She's so often asked to play the sun goddess or the bitch from hell. When women are intelligent, they always get asked to play cold, manipulative characters. I wanted to let her play an ordinary person, more in sync with what she's like."

Hawke often sounds so at peace with his career and personal life that it can be jarring to hear him explain that the message of Chelsea Walls is about loneliness. "The hotel becomes a metaphor for the house in which we all live," he says, "people who live right next door to each other but can't connect."

Hawke, who plans to direct more movies, seems determined to avoid such a fate. "For me, it's pretty simple," he says. "It's all about living an engaged life."